Quotes from Tim Powers

Bacon flinched, then with hollow flippancy quoted the Book of Judges: "With the jawbone of an ass you have slain your thousands.

I'd be happy just to go back to about 1990," said Scott quietly. "The way we all were then.

The evening breeze was strong and from the sea; the three ships moored offshore were nudged parallel, and the fires on the beach threw sparks away from the setting sun toward the black Florida cypress swamps. In the raised hut the pirates had built on a sandy rise just inland of the fires, Beth Hurwood peered out at the sky and the sea, and filled her lungs with the cool sea air, and prayed that the breeze would hold until dawn.

there appeared one of the randomly floating spheres of phosphorescence that the pirates called spirit balls; it lifted above the wispy surface of the fog and bounced slowly among the cypress branches and the dangling masses of Spanish moss, and then, just as slowly, fell back into the fog-river, and the glow became nebulous and then died out.

Beth gasped, then whirled and ran back in despair toward the fires, her most basic assumptions about the world shaken for the first time; for she knew beyond hope of rationalization that, though the voice had been Bonnett's and had come out of his mouth, it had been someone else speaking to her through them.

What made him shift each boot from one step to the next one down, and then the other boot to the one below that, was the thought of being able to read books. He had of course seen the things many times, and had seen people peer into pages and then raise their heads knowing things they hadn't known before.

And who is this Maître Carrefour?" "Hm? Oh, that's our old friend Mate Care-For. Thatch just pronounces it right. It means master of the crossroads. Master of different possibilities, in other words—of chance.

Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for.

Los mares y los climas son lo que son; los navíos solo pueden adaptarse a ellos o hundirse. Jack Shandy

The Irishman had a tendency to let long-standing guilt dry out into annoyance.

Another howl broke from the tent downstream, this one sounding more like pieces of metal being violined against each other than an issue from any organic throat.

What normal people perceive as the instant of "now" is in fact just the blanket average of an infinity of time-spikes that spring up and disappear at the interface between the fluid future and the crystallized past. The spikes are quantum extensions of the past into the future, but they're far too brief to have any effect on the world's smooth continuity.

Oh hell, Vader, beer is old fashioned, salt is old fashioned. Why do you think magic spells in stories always rhyme? And kids' jump-rope rituals? And political slogans? The subconscious, the pre-rational part of your brain, thinks a statement must be important if it rhymes. And meter, that drum-beat—imagine how uninspiring the St. Crispin's Day speech in Henry V would have been if it wasn't in iambic pentameter!

You can't undo baptism.

Is stealing stolen property less reprehensible than plain stealing?

Hurwood nodded. "We're not really in Florida now—or not particularly, anyway, not Florida any more than we're in every other place.

He found he was implicitly confident of a way out…and his face reddened when he realized that it was an axiom called up from early childhood—the conviction that if he cried hard enough and long enough, someone would take him home.

knowledge is better than wonder

The dead become more powerful as time goes by, you see, boy. What was just an unquiet ghost to your grandfather could be a full-fledged loa to your grandchildren. And I've learned to bend 'em, train 'em in certain directions like you would a vine. Farmer plant a seed in the ground and one day have a tree—I put a ghost in a bottle under running water and one day I have a loa.

Duffy nodded civilly, reflecting, though, that the surest way to get Aurelianus to talk about chickens was to ask him about cheese.

A man with the right kind of power can be immortal by means of it, if he takes care to live on the sea.

But maybe it's better to be an outlaw with purpose than a citizen without.

Duffy watched the wooden chest bobbing slowly away downstream. "Noon?" he repeated absently. "What's so special about noon?" Aurelianus tried standing up again, and made it this time. "All these magics involve a breaking or violation of the natural laws," he told Duffy, "and those laws relax just a little, are weakest, at noon and midnight.

Yes," said Hurwood, "and don't try. It isn't any where—where is as inappropriate to this phenomenon as who. If you watch for it you're watching for a what, at some particular where and when—and on that basis you may find many things, but you won't find…" He finished the sentence with a vague wave and a fading whistle.